Simon Willison, with Cynthia Dunlop for her tech blogger interview series (from back in January, but he just got around to linking to it so I just got around to seeing it):

Any lessons learned that you want to share with the community?

My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.

Nobody will ever know how perfect the thing you intended to write would have been. The flaws you see in your writing are invisible to everyone else.

This is excellent advice. Me, I try to get into the mindset of playing live music, not recording a studio album. Except when I’m writing a piece where I really want it to be an album. Those aren’t rare, per se, but they’re occasional. If I tried to make every post a hall-of-famer I’d never get anything out.

I’m aiming for professionalism. I’m performing live in front of an audience — not just jamming in my garage or bedroom, fucking around. So I’m careful and concentrate. I want to hit every note, in time. But at my best I’m moving from song to song.

But that leads to Dunlop’s next question for Willison:

Your advice for people just getting started with blogging?

Just start. It’s so easy to get caught in the trap of obsessing over the design of your blog, and planning for content that you never actually get around to writing. As long as each entry has a date on it and a permanent URL, it counts as a blog. I think adding an Atom or RSS feed is important too, but you can get started without one — don’t treat that as a blocker.

Don’t worry if nobody reads it. People are unlikely to stumble on your blog organically, but what matters is not the quantity but the quality of your readers. If the only person who reads your blog is a hiring manager that you send a link to, and that gets you an interview, your blog has already paid itself off many times over.

That’s the hard part about getting started, or at least it was for me. When you already have an audience it’s easier to take it seriously, to concentrate, to focus, to strive for perfection even though you will fall short. If you’re playing music in an empty room it’s harder to do that, to play the same way you would with an audience of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people in front of you.

But just imagine they’re there. They will be if you keep it up. That’s one of my bits of advice to new bloggers: I firmly believe all blogs eventually get the audience they deserve, if they keep going. Write for the audience you want, not the audience you have.

Jeremy Hsu, Ars Technica:

Google briefly allowed anyone to create AI-modified versions of satellite imagery available in Google Earth — before quickly reversing its decision as people shared examples of AI-generated pictures that illustrated the potential for misinformation and disinformation.

Momentum!

A bunch of mine are stored here.

Simon Willison:

So that’s Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta. Google Gemini really needs to catch up on accidentally cyberattacking other companies.

I’m surprised Willison hasn’t heard about how much momentum Gemini has.

Meta AI:

We’re excited to release Muse Code (beta), a terminal coding agent powered by Muse Spark 1.2, our newest model. This marks our next step toward the frontier, with larger and much more capable models on the way. [...]

Muse Code takes on complex software engineering tasks across large repositories: planning changes, writing code, and validating the results. It can coordinate multiple persistent subagents for each task, solving difficult problems faster, more accurately, and with less intervention.

Terminal-only (so far), so it avoids the whole native-app-versus-Electron-shit-sandwich debate. They’ve embedded some fun interactive examples of Spark’s output right in the web page.

Simon Willison:

An interesting twist on pricing is that the model is offered as two different model IDs. muse-spark-1.2 is priced at $1.25/million input and $4.25/million output — close to Gemini 3.6 Flash ($1.50/$7.50) — but if you agree to let Meta use your data “to improve our products” you can use muse-spark-1.2-contributor which is $0.10/$0.20 — a huge discount, closer to GPT-5.6 Luna ($0.20/$1.20) and Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite ($0.25/$1.50).

That’s over a 10× discount in exchange for giving your data to Meta. I can see the appeal if you don’t care about the privacy of your data and code, like, say, if you’re using Muse Spark to generate code for a throwaway project, or for something that’s open source anyway. But I wonder if Meta has considered that this offer might spook would-be users who absolutely do not want to grant Meta the rights to their data. One would hope that the two systems have a strong firewall between them. But given Meta’s well-established contempt for the sanctity of user data, it’s not at all unreasonable to suspect that the difference here is like reserving a no-smoking seat in an airplane with a smoking section.

Joe Fabisevich, on Mastodon:

I submitted Plinky 6.0.4 for review last week. The macOS app was approved in 4 hours, the iOS app is still waiting for review. Sure do love to distribute software this way.

He’s not an outlier; I see comments like this from App Store developers everywhere I look.

(Plinky, by the way, is an intriguing link-bookmarking app that syncs across iOS and MacOS. It’s not for me, but the nature of my work is such that I have very unusual bookmarking needs. Plinky offers a bunch of convenient ways to stash new bookmarks with low friction. It’s a labor of love — it’s totally obvious that Fabisevich himself is the number one user of Plinky, and that’s almost always true of the very best apps.)

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, the company’s artificial intelligence research lab:

We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history. I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand. It’s critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder.

With this backdrop, I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability. I will be taking on a new strategic role as Chair of GDM and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, and I’m excited to announce that Koray will be stepping up to lead GDM as SVP of Google DeepMind, in addition to his role as Chief AI Architect of Google.

Google published Hassabis’s letter alongside a letter from Sundar Pichai, and all of this is happening alongside four longtime Google leaders leaving to form a new AI-focused company. The headline of Google’s dual-memo announcement was “The Next Chapter of Our AI Momentum”, and Pichai uses the same word in 10 percent of his 30 sentences (emphasis added):

And you saw the incredible momentum at earnings across all our businesses, including Search, YouTube, and Cloud. […]

Google DeepMind: We are building strong momentum: Flash is in high demand, our Cyber model is live, and Gemma models have surpassed 900M+ downloads. […]

With today’s changes we’re going to keep driving our momentum. Onwards!

Methinks he doth protest too much. If Google really had the momentum in AI that Pichai is declaring, I suspect Gemini might have suggested he’s overusing the word.

Steven Levy, writing for Wired:

Today it’s official: After almost 27 years, Dean is leaving Google, along with Ghemawat and two other top-tier AI scientists, to found a company called Discovery Loop.

Even though Google will take a stake in the new company, it’s a devastating blow to the search giant as it attempts to keep pace in the frantic AI model competition. It’s bad enough that Dean and Ghemawat, who were among the company’s first hires, are leaving — that’s like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards ditching the Rolling Stones to start a new band. Worse, the other cofounders are also supernovas in the AI firmament: Oriol Vinyals, VP of research at DeepMind and a technical lead for Gemini, and Quoc Le, a cofounder of Google Brain and the key scientist behind Google’s AutoML-Zero, a project that uses machine learning algorithms to autonomously build AI products.

In an interview I did with the cofounders just before launch, Dean tells me the idea came up only a few weeks ago. He was quickly joined by the other three, who are not only long-time colleagues but friends who vacation together. “We were working on different things, but we were all starting to see the possibility of AI being able to automate scientific and engineering loops,” he says.

I think the Jagger/Richards analogy is strained, to say the least, but the tectonic plates have shifted this week over in Googleland. This might be to Google what io is to Apple — something that ought to have happened within rather than requiring departures of legendary talent.

[Update, Saturday 8 August: This story is retracted. Details forthcoming.]

Terry Godier, “Browsers Have Standards, the App Store Has Judgment”:

A while ago I tried to submit an iOS app for Dark Hours, my astronomy website for normal people. It was rejected on the grounds that it was astrology.

It has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I’ve asked, would associate with astrology.

I penned a nice little rant two years ago expressing my fury over the way that kooks promoting astrology often try to insinuate that their voodoo pseudoscience is even vaguely related to the hard science of astronomy. And it really is an unfortunate fluke of the English language that two subjects with a contentious relationship are differentiated as words by two letters. Even if you know the difference between the two, and care, if you’re reading quickly your eyes might conflate one word with the other.

But if you actually look at Godier’s Dark Hours, for even just a few seconds, it is instantly obvious that it pertains to the science of astronomy and has absolutely nothing — zero, zilch, nada — to do with astrology. So even if Apple’s App Store reviewer misread the submission’s description, and wrongly assumed it was yet another quack astrology app, if they launched it and spent just a few seconds poking around, they should have instantly recognized their incorrect assumption. But that’s not what happened. They rejected the app on the utterly incorrect grounds that it pertained to astrology. If this was an honest mistake from a reasonable judicial board, you’d expect the interaction with Godier, the developer, to have gone something like this:

App Review: REJECTED: Astrology.
Developer: No, it’s astroNoMy not astroLoGy.
App Review: Oh, sorry! Carry on, APPROVED.

But that’s not what happened at all. Godier proceeded through a series of escalations up to the App Review Board and the Review Board responded that they determined the original rejection was valid because, I shit you not, “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.” Which isn’t even about astrology. It’s straight out of Kafka.

Dark Hours is not just merely unrelated to astrology (let alone tarot-card reading). It’s actually exquisitely well-designed and painstakingly crafted. It’s exactly the sort of app that the App Store ought to celebrate and highlight. It doesn’t just belong in the category of astronomy apps in the App Store, it will raise the quality bar for astronomy apps in the App Store. iOS-exclusive, native Liquid Glass UI, smooth scrolling, beautiful typography and layout, and way more useful as a native mobile app than as a website. Go check out the website and I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s the sort of thing that would be even cooler as an app. But it is an app, and the app is better and more useful than the website version, and Godier has fought to get it approved. But Apple’s App Review Board said no, on fallacious easily-refuted grounds. This isn’t just contrary to the benefit of developers, like Godier. It’s obviously contrary to the benefit of Apple itself, which should not just accept an app like Dark Hours, but celebrate it as an exemplar of the platform.

Mistakes happen. But in a functioning system mistakes get corrected, and mistakes as obvious as this one get corrected almost instantly and include a quick apology for the conflation. The App Store is not a functioning system.

Meghan Bobrowsky and Erin Mulvaney, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

A New Mexico judge ordered Meta Platforms to pay more than $900 million and limit the time young people in the state can spend on its apps, significantly increasing the cost of the landmark child safety verdict against the Facebook and Instagram parent.

The judge said Thursday that Meta must create a new $567 million abatement fund in addition to paying $375 million in civil penalties that a jury previously ordered. The company must also enact certain safety features such as limiting the amount of time underage users in the state spend on Facebook and Instagram, hiding by default the number of “likes” on photos for such people and disclosing to users there the risks of its platforms.

The creation of the fund, aimed at rectifying harms caused by the Facebook parent’s social-media apps, was “necessary, due to the wide-ranging impacts of the harm and the complex nature of the remedy,” state Judge Bryan Biedscheid said. The dollar-amount of the abatement fund was slightly smaller than the $779.5 million attorneys for the state sought.

Meta said it disagreed with the ruling and planned to appeal.

You don’t say.

The next trial, brought by four state attorneys general, begins jury selection in Oakland, Calif., next week. Meta said in a court filing that the states in that case are asking for more than $1 trillion in damages.

The case they just lost, with a judgment of about $1 billion, was for New Mexico alone. If this isn’t overturned, and then sets nationwide precedent, we’re talking real money. The tobacco companies survived, but this seems like that. Investors seem unconcerned — Meta’s stock is up 1.5% so far this morning.

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg (gift link):

OpenAI expects users to rely on the smart speaker throughout the day. It will work similarly to the company’s ChatGPT voice mode on smartphone apps, but with more advanced models for humanlike interactivity. The device is designed to learn more about a user over time, letting it tailor conversations and act more like a real person.

The circle-shaped device will include parts that move on their own, according to the people. That will help show when it’s responding and interacting with the user. The goal is to make the object feel more alive than today’s stationary speaker products. The product will have speaker grills and microphones for fielding commands and conversing with users. The battery-powered item will be designed to work in different positions — in a user’s hand, say, or placed on a nightstand or kitchen counter.

OpenAI is also planning to include lights on the device to demonstrate when it’s listening and make interactions feel more personal. A camera system and other sensors, meanwhile, will perceive the surrounding environment and feed visual information into the AI.

This doesn’t sound like a “smart speaker” with lights, moving parts, cameras, and other sensors. It sounds like a robot companion, and a robot companion obviously needs a speaker, amongst its other essential features. It’s like calling R2-D2 “a smart speaker” — it wouldn’t be wrong but it’s missing the point. (You could technically call the iPhone “a smart speaker”.) What the io device seems to be missing is autonomous movement. So you need to carry it around like a mogwai, rather than it following you around or going places on its own. I couldn’t give two shits about an OpenAI “smart speaker” if the point is just to play music and podcasts, but a handheld cross between R2-D2 and C-3PO, that could be fucking cool.

It’s a pet, it sounds like. A revolutionary pet, if they pull it off. And people love their pets.

This is more like it. No mealymouthing or wishy-washiness here. This is a strident defense. I’ll quote just one line for now:

Apple offers nothing because it has nothing because there is nothing. Its Complaint cannot and does not state a misappropriation claim against Defendant Tan.

I’ll post more thoughts later, but if you’re following this lawsuit, you should read OpenAI’s motion yourself. It’s cogently written, not mired in legalese. Legalese is generally a sign of shitty lawyers. The law is meant to be practiced by lawyers, but understood by everyone. The law is not a priesthood; motions in a lawsuit are not holy texts reserved for the sainted few. What boggles my mind is that almost none of the outlets reporting on this today linked to OpenAI’s actual motion. (Kudos to Jess Weatherbed of The Verge, who did.) Summaries are necessary and commentary is good, but for chrissake link to the source document.

This comic from Brendan Leonard is a fine companion to yesterday’s items (here and here) on pausing to consider if our use of AI is helping us focus our time on what we love to do, or, instead, robbing us of the things that make us human. The bit about making a sandwich hit close enough to home for me to make me laugh aloud.

Regarding my earlier complaint about it being a slog to open Safari’s preferences in the Settings app on iOS, a few readers pointed me to this tweet last year from Quinn Nelson, showing how to build (or download from iCloud) a simple Shortcuts shortcut that you can add to Control Center to open the current app’s preferences in Settings. Works great.

Update: Stephen Robles:

I made a few riffs off that one as well:

• Jump to current app notification settings
• Current app storage
• Open current app in App Store

Tanya Gazdik, reporting for MediaPost back in December 2023:

Despite the ever-expanding screens in its vehicles, including an available 31-inch backseat theatre screen, BMW has no plans to sell advertising on any of them. Radio commercials are intrusive enough, says Stephan Durach, the brand’s senior vice president, connected company development.

“At the end of the day, I think your car is your last private space,” Durach told a small group of media members last week during a roundtable discussion. “It’s where you can do whatever you want by yourself — you have the right temperature, the music you want. To say I’m selling the screen to play a commercial — I don’t see it. It’s a private space.”

So much for that.

BMW has not been afraid to push the envelope to find new ways to make money. The automaker was the first to charge a fee for heated seats in its vehicles in some overseas markets. But earlier this fall, the automaker dropped the heated seats subscription option after customers expressed discontent for having to pay to unlock existing functions in their cars.

“Discontent” is doing a lot of work there.

I got this MediaPost link from this article in Der Spiegel, regarding the outrage over the Spider-Man ad BMW injected into the dashboards of its vehicles around the world last week. The Der Spiegel article is in German, but according to Safari’s translation to English, a BMW spokesperson had the temerity to claim that the Spider-Man promotion is not an advertisement, but instead “a special surprise for its customers”, and that it is “not intended to advertise the film or serve as a conventional film trailer. In this respect, it is also not classic advertising — and no advertising will continue to be displayed in the vehicle.”

If BMW was paid by Sony for this, it’s by definition an advertisement. If I owned a BMW and this fucking thing showed up on my dashboard I’d feel compelled to take it back to the dealership and drive it right through the window into the showroom, to reciprocate with “a special surprise” for them.

Back in March I sung the praises of Jeff Johnson’s StopTheScript and StopTheMadness Safari extensions. I want to re-link to StopTheScript in particular. I wrote last week about ad-blocking content blockers, and I’ve gotten a slew of wonderful feedback from readers about that. (My thanks to everyone who whitelisted DF with their ad-blocker of choice, too.)

One of the recurring issues that readers raised are sites that present “It looks like you’re running an ad-blocker...” dickovers. It’s classic whack-a-mole: (1) website shows annoying obtrusive ads; (2) you install a browser extension to hide those ads; (3) website tries to detect that you’re hiding their ads and prevent you from accessing their content until you turn it off. Fuck them. It’s your web browser.

The detectors require JavaScript to do their thing. The entire purpose of StopTheScript is to disable JavaScript on a per-website basis. By itself, Safari only offers a global on/off switch for JavaScript (in the Security tab in its Settings window on Mac, or in Settings → Apps → Safari → Advanced on iOS). For me, and probably for you, it’s unfeasible to browse the entire web with JavaScript disabled. StopTheScript is the solution. When you run into a website where JavaScript is being used against you, just tap the StopTheScript button in Safari’s toolbar and then tap “Always Allow on This Website” — or, what I often do, tap “Allow for One Day” just to see if it helps.

For these ad-blocker-detecting-dickovers, StopTheScript generally works like a charm. I just used it earlier today when I linked to the BMW/Spider-Man ad story at The Hollywood Reporter. Turned off JavaScript on THR’s website, reloaded the web page, and boom, their fucking dickover was gone. Turning off JavaScript on THR does have other side effects — it prevents the loading of thumbnail images in the sidebar list of “Most Popular” articles — screenshot. I see this as a positive side effect, not a negative. StopTheScript also works like a charm to disable the ad-blocker-detecting-dickover at Snopes, which I linked to for my Ulysses S. Grant post this week. And you will definitely want to enable it for Reuters.

If turning off JavaScript breaks a website, you can re-allow it. It’s easier on the Mac: Control-click on the StopTheScript toolbar button and choose “Manage Extension...” — this will jump you to the right place in Safari’s Settings. On iOS, you’ve (alas) got to trek into the Settings app (Settings → Apps → Safari → Extensions → StopTheScript) to revoke it for a particular website.

StopTheScript is a $6 one-time purchase, including Mac, iPhone, and iPad. A veritable bargain.

James Hibberd, The Hollywood Reporter:

BMW owners are taking to social media to express outrage that the automaker suddenly started pushing ads for Spider-Man: Brand New Day onto their dashboards.

The ads began appearing last week on newer-model vehicles and some drivers who forked up to $160,000 for a luxury car or SUV aren’t very happy about being spammed when they start their cars. The promotion is scheduled to run through Aug. 10, according to the automaker’s press release, and represents a partnership between the automaker and Sony-Marvel.

Some of the scathing comments on Reddit’s r/BMW forum and other subreddits include: “That’s some absolute bullshit”; “Insanely dystopian”; “This needs to be made illegal before everyone starts doing it”; “$130K to get a Spider-Man commercial”; “sounds like a Black Mirror episode” and simply: “Fuck everything about this.”

A banner touting the film first appears when the car is started, though owners have to click on the ad to see the full video. Still, one owner claimed BMW has been pushing increasingly intrusive videos onto its dashboard space.

This is absolutely insane, especially for cars that people own. If you own a car and an ad is shown in your car, you should get paid for the ad. And you should need to agree to it first. BMW is supposed to be a luxury brand, and one meant for driving enthusiasts. This is so absurd it’s hard to believe it’s real. I asked a family member who just got a new BMW to confirm it. Unbelievable.

I find most poetry obtuse, dancing around a point rather than making one sharply. Not this one.

Matthew Green:

If you’re under the impression that these models are “glorified autocomplete” or that progress is slowing down, I need to urge you: stop thinking that. The models are very intelligent and capable, they are getting better at a fast clip. I can cite measurable and impressive progress over just the past five months on specific types of problem I’ve asked them to look at. If there’s a ceiling out there, I don’t yet see evidence of it. The people who think models are dumb are mostly using Google’s free AI search results, and not interacting with the high-end stuff (which only costs $20, so it’s not out of reach.) And they’re mostly not working in new areas.

On the other hand: if you think that models are super-intelligent or that AGI is already here, you should also stop thinking that. Working with these tools is like swimming in a pond where the ground drops off sharply. One minute you’re wading comfortably and there’s support under your feet. Then suddenly you cross a specific line, and you’re back to swimming on your own. This analogy is my best way to explain what it feels like when the model goes from helpful to clueless.

Green is second-to-none in his ability to explain advanced cryptography in easily understood ways, without dumbing it down.

New York Times Magazine story editor Willy Staley tried Sean O’Mara’s “Living Diet” (nothing but steak and fermented foods like sauerkraut) for a week:

To O’Mara, the diet is not just a temporary means of losing weight but a way to eat for good. He has been doing it for 10 years, and credits it with turning his life around. At one point in our conversation he pulled up the Bristol Stool Chart, which ranges from Type 1 (“separate, hard pellets”) to Type 7 (“watery, no solid pieces”). O’Mara is consistently delivering Type 4 (“smooth, soft, like a snake”), with pointed ends, indicative of healthy rectal function, he told me. “When you start eating healthy, you don’t need toilet paper,” he claimed. “Animals in the wild have no residual stool on their anus.” He described a proper bowel movement to me this way: odorless, wipe-free, over in three to seven seconds and “nearly orgasmic.”

“I could have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room,” he said, “and nobody would know.”

My first thought upon reading this was, What a load of shit. Then I realized, well, yes, literally.

Then I thought about it some more and realized this is the Platonic ideal of a bullshit claim. If I told you that, say, I can eat an entire meal while doing a headstand, you could say, “I don’t believe you, show me.” But who in their right mind would challenge this quack O’Mara on this one? Certainly not the hosts of the dinner party, that’s for sure.